Why You Can't Trust Letters of Recommendation
Friends use puffery and foes carry out vendettas -- while everyone
fears lawsuits
By ALISON SCHNEIDER

Need to write a recommendation for someone going on the academic job
market? Trying to decipher an outside review in a tenure case? Here are
a few helpful hints:

"Good" does not mean good. It means hopelessly mediocre. "Solid" is shorthand for plodding and unimaginative. And "flashes of brilliance"
is a nice way of saying that the scholar in question suffers from long
languors of incoherence punctuated by random insights.

As for letters that are full of heady praise, well, they're not
exactly models of forthrightness, either.

Take this tale -- and it's not apocryphal. A dean at a research
university came across a recommendation for a job applicant that
included this closing line: "In over 20 years of university teaching,
Dr. X is clearly the best young scholar I have encountered." There was
just one hitch: That's exactly how the professor wrapped up his
recommendation of another applicant for the same post.

In academe, some letters really are too good to be true. Puffery is
rampant. Evasion abounds. Deliberate obfuscation is the rule of the
day.

What do you expect, scholars ask, when a mild criticism or an
off-the-cuff adjective can crush a career -- the letter writer's
included? Lawsuits, reprisals, frayed relations with colleagues: There
are good reasons, professors insist, why grades are not the only things
inflated in academe.

What can't be inflated is the critical role letters play in higher
education. They can derail a tenure bid, clinch a job, tip the scales
for that Guggenheim grant. Sure, they're padded with accolades and
peppered with code. But there is a decipherable rhetoric to
recommendations. Even the people who recognize the massive B.S.
quotient -- even Timothy Lomperis, chairman of the political-science
department at Saint Louis University -- won't deny that "letters are
really important."

They pretty much doomed his bid for tenure eight years ago at Duke
University.

An endorsement by a traditionalist in political science was shot
down by members of the rational-choice crowd at Duke, who don't much
care for Mr. Lomperis's work, he says. And when a key player in the
discipline declined to write at all, citing illness, "that was really
held against me."

Members of the department don't deny that the letters played a
crucial in the tenure decision, but insist that nothing nefarious was
going on. Mr. Lomperis didn't get tenure because too many outside
reviewers questioned his scholarly significance, department members
said at the time.

But Mr. Lomperis thinks otherwise. "People try to get letters to
stack up in one direction or another," he says, and those letters are
not used to genuinely explore a candidate's merit. "They're used to
solidify positions already held."

That's been a complaint for years, and grounds for more than one
grievance. Last year, Cecelia Lynch filed a complaint against
Northwestern University with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission. Northwestern's president personally solicited letters to
torpedo her tenure bid, seeking comment from scholars he knew were
hostile to the candidate's intellectual leanings, Ms. Lynch said.
Northwestern has denied wrongdoing.

In 1997, the historian Karen Sawislak filed a sex-bias complaint
against Stanford University. At issue: whether the dean had selectively
read the letters in her tenure file, picking out the few mild
criticisms as the basis for his negative decision while discounting the
pages of glowing praise. Stanford has defended its actions.

Then there are the institutions that bury the name of a job
candidate in a long list of professors and ask letter writers to name
their top pick. That approach is loaded with problems, says Kay Lehman
Schlozman, a political scientist at Boston College. An institution can
sandwich a candidate's name amid a list of more junior colleagues (if
they want to hire the person) or more senior colleagues (if they want
to sabotage the person). "It's very easy to influence the outcome," she
argues, depending on whose names go on the list and who is asked to
comment on it.

But even the people who acknowledge the problems with
recommendations have not stopped using them. "Letters are subject to
abuse and manipulation," says Mr. Lomperis, the Saint Louis chairman.
"But I don't know how else to do business."

Neither does anybody else. Peer review -- one of academe's central
enterprises and sacred cows -- may be flawed, but few academics can
imagine hiring or tenuring without it. Everybody is busy peer reviewing
everybody else -- for jobs, promotions, even measly summer stipends.
And all those reviewers are engaged in a delicate dance -- mincing
their words, monitoring their tone, making sure to balance someone's
career against their own credibility.

It's a fine line to walk, and a lot of people have crossed it. Like
the philosopher who writes every year or two in his recommendations:
"Now I know what it's like to have Wittgenstein in my class." Or the
philosophy department that annually calls its latest Ph.D. one of the
best three students it's produced in the past five years.

Most academics take comfort in the notion that honesty comes on a
sliding scale. "There's a continuum here in terms of candor," explains
Richard R. Beeman, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the
University of Pennsylvania. At one end of the spectrum, the more candid
end, you find outside reviews for tenure, where the high stakes and
external nature of the review process encourage at least a few hard
calls. At the other lie the candy-coated letters for undergraduates.
"When you're writing one of 50,000 letters to Harvard Law School,
there's not too much conscience operating in terms of restraining
hyperbole," Mr. Beeman says.

And then there are the letters for academic job candidates -- where
beyond-the-pale praise meets between-the-lines truth.

"People want their students to succeed. They want their departments
to succeed," says Brian Leiter, a professor of law and philosophy at
the University of Texas at Austin. Reputations -- of professors and
programs -- are riding on those placement numbers, not to mention the
prospects of a newly minted Ph.D. "It becomes like a nuclear-arms race.
If Michigan is using lots of adjectives, U.C.L.A. better, too. Someone
who is candid risks damaging their students, because candor is
uncommon."

Indeed. When it comes to recommendations for jobs, academe seems to
have taken up permanent residence along the shores of Lake Wobegon. All
of the applicants are above average -- way above.

"Over the last 20 years, inflation of recommendations has paralleled
the inflation of grades," says Stuart Rojstaczer, an associate
professor of hydrology at Duke University. "Someone to whom you might
have given a good recommendation 20 years ago, you now say is very
good. Very good is excellent, and excellent is outstanding. And if
someone truly is outstanding," he says, his voice trailing off, "well,
I don't know what you say."

He once made the mistake of pumping up the volume in a letter sent
to a university in Britain, where hyperbole is not the norm. The
student was excellent; he called her "outstanding." The next thing he
knew, he was the one getting called -- by the search committee. They
wanted to know if the letter had been forged. "It was so hyperbolic in
their eyes that they couldn't believe it," Mr. Rojstaczer says.

Mr. Leiter, the Texas philosopher, explains: "An English philosopher
might write, 'So-and-so has done very fine work.' If that were coming
out of Harvard, it would mean this person barely has a three-digit I.Q.
Coming out of Oxford, it could well mean this person is one of the top
three people coming out of the U.K."

So what do American professors do when someone really is
middle-of-the-road? Suggest that the person seek out a reference from
someone else, of course. And when faculty members can't get a so-so
student off their hands, well, there are polite ways of couching
unpleasant truths.

"Writing a letter of recommendation for someone you want to promote
is like putting makeup on," says Lennard J. Davis, head of the English
department at Illinois-Chicago. "You have to accentuate what looks good
and cover up the blemishes." It's an art form both in the writing and
the reading. "You are entering the world of hermeneutics and
interpretation."

Got a student who lacks focus and keeps overreaching? Call him
"ambitious." Looking for a nice way to describe an antisocial
colleague? "Keeps her own counsel" ought to do the trick.

Context, of course, is everything. A good letter says something
about a candidate's research, teaching, personality, leadership
potential, and impact on the field. If you really want to sell
somebody, compare the person to other big names in the discipline. If
not, keep mum. There's no need to slam someone's scholarship. Just
focus the entire recommendation on their teaching. The review committee
can do the math for themselves.

"I never speak ill of anybody," says Nell Irvin Painter, a historian
at Princeton University. "There's a pretty clear list of things you
need to cover. When you don't talk about something, that speaks
volumes. This sounds terrible, but you can be unhelpful without
badmouthing people."

It's called damning with faint praise. But the question remains: Why
are tenured professors so reluctant to tell it like it is?

A story from Ms. Painter might shed some light. Back in the 1980's,
a fellow historian meekly approached her at a conference, apology in
hand. For five years, the woman had been calling Ms. Painter, one of
the most prominent black female historians in the country, "antiblack
and antifemale" because of a negative tenure letter that she'd heard
Ms. Painter had written about a black woman. Years later, after
dragging Ms. Painter's name through the mud, the other historian found
out that the poison letter wasn't penned by Ms. Painter after all.
Oops.

But Ms. Painter had learned a valuable lesson: "One reason for not
speaking ill ofpeople is because it says something ill about you."

Maybe candor wouldn't be such a problem if confidentiality weren't
such a question mark. Yes, academics pay lip service to the secrecy of
the hiring-and-promotion process, but let's face it, professors say, a
lot of those lips are loose.

"I've seen cases where people are candid, and they're harassed for
it," says Marjorie Perloff, an English professor at Stanford
University.

She is a case in point. Ms. Perloff once wrote a negative tenure
evaluation for a professor at a large state university. As it turns
out, the tenure candidate's husband worked in the same department as
she did. "Before long, the husband called me up. He said, 'I don't
think you really understood her book. You didn't realize X, Y, and Z.
Are you sure you don't want to reconsider?' I was appalled."

Other people are, too. Philip Gossett, a professor of music and
former dean of humanities at the University of Chicago, had his own bad
experience with letters of recommendation. His beef: Systems that
operate under open-records laws, like the University of California.
Professors writing letters for colleagues in the California system are
warned in advance that tenure candidates can read redacted copies of
their evaluations. All that's left out is the letterhead, the
signature, and any identifying information below the signature block.
If the writer is careless enough to sprinkle identifying information in
the body of the text, it's there for the candidate to read.

But even without telltale comments in an evaluation, a candidate can
often figure out who wrote it. Academics work in finite communities.
Everybody knows everybody else, not to mention everybody else's writing
style and intellectual leanings.

One day, Mr. Gossett was writing a tenure endorsement for a
California professor, ticking off the candidate's strengths and
weaknesses. Not long after, the candidate buttonholed Mr. Gossett at a
meeting "and proceeded to rake me over the coals for having said
anything that wasn't 100-percent positive," the music professor
recounts. "I was aghast that in what was not a contentious situation --
the tenure went through without difficulty -- my letter would become
public knowledge. It seemed utterly gratuitous and ultimately dangerous
to the system of peer review to put people in that kind of situation."

His response: to never write for the University of California system
again.

Other people have found less radical solutions. "We had one person
who put the entire letter under the signature block," says Kevin
Hoover, chairman of the economics department on California's Davis
campus. Mr. Hoover mailed it back.

Then there was the time a reviewer wrote a positive endorsement of a
job candidate, only to scrawl beneath the signature block, "Not for
U.C. Davis."

"He wanted the candidate to get a job," Mr. Hoover says, "but he
didn't want to do us any damage." Or himself. The writer knew people in
the economics department. "People do have reputations to protect."

That's not all they're protecting. Reputations are one thing;
lawsuits are another. Suits against letter writers are almost unheard
of, but fear of them is rampant.

To add fuel to those fears, there is a case pending at Radford
University. L. Keith Larimore, a management professor, is suing four
Radford colleagues for libel and defamation. He says they falsely
accused him, in their written evaluations of his tenure bid, of
inflating his publication record by fobbing off previously published
findings on unsuspecting journals.

The defendants argued that their comments -- made in the course of
their professional duties -- had absolute immunity. The Virginia
Supreme Court disagreed. The defendants have only a qualified
privilege, the court ruled in April. If Mr. Larimore proves that the
comments are false and were made with malice, he'll win his suit. He is
seeking $900,000 in damages.

Prior to the Virginia ruling, "it was unclear what protections
participants in tenure cases had," says G. David Nixon, Mr. Larimore's
lawyer. Many thought they could hide behind the notion of absolute
immunity for employees performing their professional duties, he says.
"This ruling almost wipes out that doctrine in the workplace. This
opens the door tremendously in defamation cases. Now all you have to do
to get into the courthouse is prove malice, and there are a million
ways to do that."

Bruce Blaylock, a management professor at Radford and one of the
defendants in the case, hopes not. He wouldn't comment on the specifics
of the case, only on its implications, which he thinks are dark indeed:
"If we lose, there will be substantial repercussions. Every university
in the country had better be on their toes. They're saying you can't be
forthright. You can't challenge a publication record."

A lot of people are hardly rushing to challenge publication records
anyway. It's not just the specter of lawsuits that holds them back, or
worries about reprisals. Something more complicated is at work --
sympathy, perhaps, or circumspection.

A tenured political scientist who asked not to be identified said
he's read only one truly negative tenure letter during his career. "I
believe that a lot of people who would write negative letters, just say
no," he says.

"I'm not saying every letter I write is a cheerleading case," he
adds. "But a denial of tenure is dramatically consequential. It may end
someone's career. I would have to think long and hard before I would
sit down and say, 'This person deserves to be fired.' I get lots of
these requests. What's the best use of my time -- doing someone in, or
writing a careful evaluation of someone's work that I respect?"

That depends on whom you ask. Ken Coates, dean of arts at the
University of New Brunswick at Saint John, in Canada, wouldn't mind
reading a few more letters that called a spade a spade.

He knows that people have good reason to fret about confidentiality.
He has heard the horror stories, too, like the one about a historian
who applied for a job at an institution with an open-records policy,
even though he didn't want the job, just so he could see what his
referees said about him.

And Mr. Coates knows the price people can pay for telling it like it
is. Five years ago, he wrote a negative evaluation of someone up for
promotion at another university. After reading the letter, the
department head called Mr. Coates to tell him that the university had
an open-records policy. He offered the dean a chance to rewrite the
letter. Mr. Coates declined.

Several days later, Mr. Coates got a call from an ally of the
candidate, questioning the dean's judgment, reminding him that the
caller had written favorable reviews about Mr. Coates in the past, and
baldly hinting that there would be payback.

Despite the ugliness, things would be a lot worse, Mr. Coates adds,
if he opted out of difficult cases instead of stepping forward. "We
have an obligation to the profession and to the institution. Not
everyone is meant to have a tenure-track job or to be promoted." And
someone has to have the guts to say so, with clarity and conviction, he
declares. "The standard letter of reference essentially says, 'This
person taught Jesus to walk on water.'"

Mr. Coates has had a few supernatural adjectives attached to him,
too. He still recalls the letter one of his references wrote when he
was applying to Ph.D. programs. He quotes: "'The work is of seminal
importance. He's about to establish a new standard for historical
research. He has enormous teaching potential.'" Then Mr. Coates does
the exegesis: "I'd been in one seminar with this person. He'd never
seen me teach. It was way over the top."

Letters like that can undermine academe, Mr. Coates says. "Finding
the right match between a candidate and a university is a pivotal part
of what we do. If we're not straightforward about a candidate, we have
the potential to create very bad matches, and then no one ends up
happy."

Professors have devised ways to put the paeans in perspective. They
pick up the phone. The only way to get the full story is by calling up
the person doing the recommending, they argue. Mr. Coates does it, and
so do a lot of other deans. "People will be more frank in a telephone
call," he says. "We've begun to use the letters as an opening gambit,
not as a final word."

But phone calls cut both ways. Not long ago, Mr. Lomperis, the
political-science chairman at Saint Louis University, had a dicey
tenure case in his department. The candidate was an exceptional
teacher, but the publication record wasn't strong. When it came time to
pick an external reviewer, he called a friend at a top university and
wasn't shy about letting the person know that he thought the candidate
was outstanding. The professor won tenure.

"Chairs can and do -- I'll admit I have -- signal what they want,"
Mr. Lomperis says. "They're not supposed to, but I'd be surprised if
well over half the chairs didn't tip their preferences to the
reviewers."

The fix, more than a few professors say, is often in from the
beginning.

Given all the conniving and code words and hyperbolic praise, it's
no wonder that people like Victor Davis Hanson, a classics professor at
California State University at Fresno, think "the whole genre has
basically been discredited." He's so sick of the superlatives that he's
just about given up reading the letters. He'll learn more watching a
candidate teach a class or translate some Greek than by taking somebody
else's word about what "the latest genius" on the job market can do, he
says.

Departments should have the wherewithal to make up their own minds
about whom to hire and tenure, based on a careful review of each
candidate's record rather than a reliance on a flawed public-opinion
poll, Mr. Hanson says.

But that strikes a lot of academics as a very bad idea -- even the
ones who've been burned. "If we're not asked to make evaluations, then
everything will happen behind closed doors," says Chicago's Mr.
Gossett. "That's a much worse system."

Ms. Schlozman of Boston College agrees. Two years ago, she published
an article in P.S.: Political Science and Politics documenting
all kinds of problems with tenure recommendations in her field. Not
only was the language over the top, she wrote, but so was the number of
letters being requested. Nevertheless, she says, "I want to emphasize
how seriously this responsibility is taken." Letters prevent
inbreeding, she argues. They provide a counterweight to the old-boy
network, help administrators unfamiliar with a specific field
understand a candidate's place within it, and give credibility to a
department's recommendation.

And for candidates, they ensure "that a secret group can't stab you
in the back without you figuring out what's going on," says David F.
Bell, a French professor at Duke. That's important, particularly for
women and minority scholars, who want assurances that negative reviews
are due to their work, not their sex or skin color.

Even hyperbole has its place, says Duke's Mr. Rojstaczer. You know
there's something wrong with candidates if they can't dig up at least
three people to wax eloquent about their achievements. "It's a checkoff
on the list -- were they able to find three people willing to write
hyberbolic letters? If not, they must be deficient."

Despite all the difficulties, more people are writing more letters
for more kinds of positions than ever before. Robin D.G. Kelley, a
historian at New York University, has a list of recommendees that's 500
names deep. Between August and February, he wrote 1,300 pages of
letters, single-spaced. "It's killing a lot of us," he says.

For time-strapped reference writers, help is on the way. Robert J.
Thornton, an economist at Lehigh University, came out with the second
edition of L.I.A.R.: Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous
Recommendations (Almus Publications, 1998). The book contains
hundreds of double-edged tributes to sidestep just about any sticky
situation. The disagreeable-student situation: "I would put this
student in a class by himself." The incompetent-candidate situation: "I
recommend this man with no qualifications whatsoever." The
substance-abuse situation: "He works with as much speed as he can."

Mr. Thornton says the lexicon has made him a much more efficient
recommendation writer. Since it came out, hardly anyone has asked him
to write any.

I recommend this person ... without reservation, with enthusiasm, with my highest endorsement.

Hire this person.

I recommend this person ... warmly, strongly, to any department with a job in her area.

Do not hire this person.

Well-grounded.

This scholar is hopelessly mired in bourgeois notions of proof.

This student is always willing to engage in vigorous debate.

This student is really obnoxious.

Solid, competent, scoured the archives, good study habits.

This student is a plodding dullard who will never produce anything of interest.

This person is an outstanding scholar (without any mention of teaching).

This person is lousy in the classroom.

This person is an outstanding teacher (without any mention of research).

This person is a lousy scholar.

Path-breaking, brilliant, first-rate, making fundamental contributions to the field.

This scholar is at the top of her discipline.

This is a person of great promise, who is working on important issues.

As a scholar, this person has not yet arrived.

Eclectic or synthetic scholarship.

This academic is a flake.

At first, this student wasn't sure she wanted to be an English major, but in the last couple of months, her work has really flowered.

This student has a lot of bad grades.

Independent thinker.

This student is arrogant and wouldn't follow his adviser's recommendations. (Depending on the context, however, it can also mean imaginative.)

The acorn hasn't fallen far from the tree.

This student's work is dreadfully derivative and adds nothing to what her dissertation adviser has already written.

Articulate.

This person is a safe minority scholar who will not give you any trouble.

He will blossom with further mentoring.

I have serious doubts that I will ever see this person publish an article, much less a book.

Smart.

This person is clever but superficial. (Although, if said about someone in the humanities, it might mean that the person is well-dressed.)

When this student walks into class, the room lights up. We had long discussions after class.

I am hopelessly in love with this student.

A note of caution: Interpreting
letters of recommendation is a tricky business. A term like
"hard-working" can be the kiss of death for a job candidate if the only
other adjectives in the letter focus on effort. But if "hard-working"
is sandwiched between long, gushing passages about keen intellect and
boundless imagination, it can clinch the deal. Context is
crucial.

SOURCE:Chronicle reporting

The Chronicle of Higher Education
June 30, 2000
Section: The Faculty
Page: A14

characters.
che-recommend.html(15): metacharacter '>' should be represented as
'>'